Murdering Americans: Daily Telegraph review

Political correctness gone mad

Ruth Dudley Edwards’s redoubtable Baroness ‘Jack’ Troutbeck is on the rampage again in the ambiguously titled Murdering Americans. Jack has been invited to become a visiting distinguished professor at an American university. She has scarcely arrived before she submits her hosts to a non-stop rant against American food, licensing laws and, above all, academia, which she discovers has been hijacked by the loony Left.

Undeterred by political correctness gone mad and the occasional murder, she embarks on a crusade to restore academic rigour to the campus. The story veers between farce, which is often hilarious, and the deadly serious. Judging by the rapturous quotes on the cover, Americans, at least those who reviewed the book, make up for any other shortcomings with a good sense of humour.

“This blithe series puts itself on the side of the angels by merrily, and staunchly, subverting every tenet of political correctness.” Patricia Craig in The Independent

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Praise for Killing the Emperors:

Having cut a swathe through the British establishment with her satirical novels, Dudley Edwards fixes her sights on American academia. Her protagonist, the outspoken rightwinger Baroness Troutbeck, accepts the post of distinguished visiting professor at an Indiana university, where she finds both staff and students ensnared in the sort of politically correct tangle that would turn the most knee-jerk liberal into a savage reactionary. Undaunted by the suspicious death of the provost, the baroness takes on the thought police with her customary aplomb. An entertaining, provocative read.

Laura Wilson

Guardian

A taste of some of the flak David Cameron can expect from Right-wingers when he convenes the party conference at Blackpool next month. The Marquess of Salisbury gave a warm tribute to his friend, Ruth Dudley Edwards, at the launch of her latest whodunit novel, Murdering Americans, at the Policy Exchange last night but was less effusive about the Tory leaders. Robert Cranborne, a patrician Tory, dismissed the current “liberal regime” of David Cameron, and praised Lady Troutbeck, the heroine of the novel, for being a “peer of high Tory principles and pronounced Sapphic tendencies”. Cranborne did once famously compare himself to “an ill-trained spaniel”.